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Rules for Revolutionaries - Becky Bond

Praise for Rules for Revolutionaries

Two of our generation’s most accomplished organizers share the creative tactics and technology they used to lead hundreds of thousands of people to volunteer their time to change the course of history—and how you can, too. This page-turner belongs in the hands of new and veteran organizers alike and will set the standard for how to make change in the twenty-first century.

—David Broockman, assistant professor of political economy, Stanford University

Becky and Zack’s rules are as refreshing as Bernie’s candidacy itself. Their rules are specific enough to get started right now and flexible enough to last for the long haul of the revolution we so desperately need.

—Tim DeChristopher, Bidder 70; cofounder, Climate Disobedience Center

"If you want to change the world and the status quo, read this book. An alternate title would appropriately be: How to Make the Impossible, Possible. Prepare to be inspired."

—Assemblywoman Lucy Flores

"For populists who want to continue Bernie Sanders’s political revolution and win radical change, this is a book for you. In their Rules for Revolutionaries, Becky Bond and Zack Exley lay down a new marker for what mass volunteer organizing makes possible by combining emerging consumer technology and radical trust with some tried and true ‘old organizing’ tactics."

—Jim Hightower, author of Swim Against the Current

Bernie Sanders’s presidential run was a spectacular wake-up call, revealing the huge number of Americans willing to fight for radical change. That includes a great many who didn’t sign up for the political revolution this time around, which is good news: Our movements can learn how to go even bigger and broader. We can win—but only if we continue to develop the kinds of tactics, tools, and vision laid out in this vitally important book, perhaps the first to explore how to organize at the true scale of the crises we face.

—Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine

Climate activists around the world watched Bernie’s vibrant volunteer network with envy and wondered whether we, too, could build that level of engagement absent a candidate and national election. Bond and Exley answer that question: Yes, we can! Everyone who wants to solve climate change—or any other big issue—should read this book and get started.

—Annie Leonard, Greenpeace USA

If you want to understand Bernie’s remarkable campaign—and more importantly, if you want to understand how to organize big, world-shaking campaigns of all kinds in the future—this is the book for you. The authors bring enormous credibility and enormous insight to a crucial task; what they describe in electoral politics goes just as much for battles like the one around the Keystone pipeline.

—Bill McKibben, New York Times bestselling author; cofounder, 350.org

"Here’s a guide from the heart of Bernie’s grassroots movement that mobilized hundreds of thousands of volunteers. Rules for Revolutionaries is a playbook for ‘big organizing’—a melding of grassroots movement tactics with new technology. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to take back our economy from the moneyed interests."

—Robert B. Reich, author of Saving Capitalism

"Rules for Revolutionaries is a lamppost for those who are committed to causes of community uplift, grassroots empowerment, and organizing for good. Insurgents get ready, this is the book for you."

—Nina Turner, assistant professor of African American history, Cuyahoga Community College; national surrogate, Bernie Sanders campaign; former Ohio state senator

This must-read book lays down twenty-two ‘rules’ designed to put power in the hands of people who want to make radical social change. Becky Bond and Zack Exley have walked the walk—and they know what organizing looks like when you begin with a big, transformative demand and challenge the establishment. You win big when you ask big—and whoever wins in November, we’ll need to push for revolutionary change from Day One. Becky and Zack’s book is a vital contribution to that project!

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Project Manager: Patricia Stone

Project Editor: Brianne Goodspeed

Copy Editor: Deborah Heimann

Proofreader: Angela Boyle

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Printed in the United States of America.

First printing November, 2016.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 17 18 19 20

Our Commitment to Green Publishing

Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. The text pages of Rules for Revolutionaries were printed on paper supplied by QuadGraphics that contains 100% postconsumer recycled fiber.

ISBN 978-1-60358-727-3 (paperback)—ISBN 978-1-60358-728-0 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

Chelsea Green Publishing

85 North Main Street, Suite 120

White River Junction, VT 05001

(802) 295-6300

www.chelseagreen.com

For the volunteers who are leading the political revolution

Contents

Preface: Becky

Preface: Zack

Why Big Organizing

1. You Won’t Get a Revolution If You Don’t Ask for One

2. The Revolution Will Not Be Handed to You on a Silver Platter

3. The Revolution Will Not Be Staffed

4. Fighting Racism Must Be at the Core of the Message to Everyone

5. Get on the Phone!

6. The Work Is Distributed. The Plan Is Centralized.

7. The Revolution Will Be Funded—by Small Donations

8. Barnstorm!

9. Fight the Tyranny of the Annoying

10. Give Away Your Passwords

11. Don’t Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Big

12. Learn the Basics of Good Management

13. If There Are No Nurses, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution

14. Grow Complexity by Solving Problems as They Arise

15. Only Hire Staff Who Embrace the Rule The Revolution Will Not Be Staffed

16. Best Practices Become Worst Practices

17. The Revolution Is Not Just Bottom Up; It’s Peer to Peer

18. Repeat Rinse and Repeat

19. There’s No Such Thing as a Single-Issue Revolution

20. Get Ready for the Counterrevolution (to Include Your Friends)

21. Put Consumer Software at the Center

22. People New to Politics Make the Best Revolutionaries

This Is How We Win

Acknowledgments

Timeline

About the Authors

Preface

• becky •

This is how we win. That was the subject line of the first email I wrote back in the fall of 2015 to the rapidly growing list of Bernie Sanders supporters. It was 6:00 a.m., and Zack and I were occupying the lobby of a Comfort Inn in Little Rock, Arkansas.

While brilliant field veterans Robert Becker and Julia Barnes were building incredible traditional campaigns on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire, Zack and I found ourselves on a team of go-for-broke irregulars charged with organizing what was then a vast outpost of the Bernie Sanders campaign for president. It was our task to help organize supporters in all the states that would not be staffed until much later in the primary campaign cycle.

Of course, Bernie didn’t win the primary, and that was heartbreaking for so many of us. As Zack and I finish up the writing of this book, we are watching the polls tighten in the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. A race that all polls have indicated would have been a cakewalk for Bernie. Meanwhile, the police continue to murder unarmed black people seemingly with impunity, and Native American tribes are leading an epic human rights protest blocking the route of a new oil pipeline from breaking sacred ground in North Dakota. We don’t know yet who will win the 2016 general election or the outcome of social justice confrontations that are reaching a boiling point. But we do know that no matter what happens next there is a new and better way forward for those of us fighting for social change.

In his inspiring run for the presidency, Bernie broke a lot of rules and challenged the conventional wisdom. Along the way, the volunteer grassroots movement that helped propel his campaign learned a whole new set of rules. Rules that can help grow the political revolution Bernie called for and revolutionize the work of social movements in the United States and around the world.

Before I left my job to work on the Bernie Sanders campaign, I was privileged to work for fifteen years at what was first known as Working Assets and then became CREDO. There I helped create and scale CREDO Action, and cofounded CREDO SuperPAC.

At CREDO I learned from my boss Michael Kieschnick to think big, to manage people and campaigns with tough love, and to look to science and testing to ensure resources were best deployed in the often asymmetrical battles waged from the progressive flank. It was through Michael that I was first introduced to the quantitative political scientist Donald Green. Green was among the first academics to apply randomized control trial methodology to the study of American voting behavior. His field experiments and field experiments inspired by his work have led to a hugely influential and growing body of science-based evidence detailing which voter turnout tactics have the greatest impact at the lowest cost.

Research shows that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the big money approach to elections isn’t what really moves voters. When it comes to moving voters to the polls in elections, it’s not the broadcast television ads that matter. Campaign robocalls make a difference only to the consultant who earns money making them. Direct mail doesn’t have much of an effect. As it turns out, when you look at the actual campaign results, the gold standard for moving voters in elections is a volunteer having a conversation with a voter on the doorstep or on the telephone.

This is great news for everyone who believes our country needs radical change. It will be hard to dispel the myth that spending big money on advertising is the path to electoral victory, but we do know that if people organize, we can go up against big money and win.

But there is so much money in politics these days—seemingly limitless amounts. Is it really possible to scale grassroots participation to a height that could actually let us go toe to toe with the billionaires and win?

That’s the question that Zack and I both left our day jobs and joined the Bernie Sanders campaign to answer. Our experiment in grassroots participation was situated on the fringes of the Bernie campaign. We were part of a small department dedicated to distributed organizing that worked outside of the traditional campaign field operation that comprised paid staffers running field offices in key states. It was our job to scale grassroots involvement in a strategic campaign at the national level.

By the end of the campaign, as part of our program more than one hundred thousand volunteers had made calls to voters, with tens of thousands of regular callers who made practically a part-time job out of it. They made more than seventy-five million calls. A few thousand volunteers individually sent over eight million text messages. More than one hundred thousand volunteer-led events were held, and more than one thousand barnstorm mass meetings were led, which fed much of this activity. It was amazing. Not only were the numbers of people getting involved big, but the time and resources people were willing to put into their fight for Bernie were astounding.

We want to be clear we were responsible for only one piece of the campaign. Zack and I spent most of the campaign in volunteer outposts that were generally beyond the reach of the traditional field operation, working with volunteers to forge a new set of rules to embrace and scale a growing movement of people willing to do something big to win something big. From the point of view of many of the traditional staffers on the campaign, we were the fringe—an almost totally irrelevant part of the campaign.

For many of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers we interacted with through our various platforms, our small team, which came to be known as the distributed organizing team, was their main connection to the campaign, and we were the people who were supposed to help them put Bernie over the top. We had an urgent mandate, access to mostly consumer software, and a huge number of volunteers ready to do whatever it would take to make Bernie the Democratic nominee. All that combined gave us the opportunity to overthrow some of the current orthodoxies, to write new rules, and to reach back in organizing history to bring back some old ones.

This book is not an inside account of the Bernie campaign, and it’s not a book about elections. It’s a book about organizing. We’re writing this book to share the new rules that emerged from our work on the Bernie campaign and in our long careers at the intersection of technology and social change organizing. It felt like we were just getting started when the primary came to an end. But we learned enough along the way to know that if the people who read this book put some of these rules into practice, and maybe write some rules of their own, we can win solutions that are as radical as the problems we face.

Preface

• zack •

This book has gone to the printer before the 2016 presidential election, so we don’t know whether Clinton or Trump is the president as you’re reading this. America either just narrowly survived its first brush with actual fascism, or we just learned that, yes, it can happen here. Either way, we believe that the rules in this book provide some of the answers for the struggle ahead.

No matter who wins in 2016, the revolution is here. In democracies, people do not accept decline forever. Real wages have been falling for forty years. Our maternal mortality rate has fallen behind every developed nation in the world and many developing nations. Forty percent of Americans will live below the poverty line at some point in their lives. Tens of millions of children who grew up in middle class homes are finding themselves firmly in the working class. Criminal justice systems at every level of government prey upon Americans of all backgrounds but disproportionately on African Americans and Latinos.

As should have been expected, when candidates emerged who were talking about the decline—and offering to do something about it—millions of voters backed them, despite how unconventional they were and despite all the baggage they carried. Bernie almost won the Democratic nomination, and Trump—defying anyone’s sense of what was possible—did win. As things get worse and worse, voters will support candidates who promise radical action. And if there are no principled alternatives emerging on the left, this creates an opening for right-wing candidates like Trump, no matter how reprehensible and no matter how crazy their solutions may be. This is a well-established pattern in history for democracies in crisis.

If you believe America should be a multiracial, multiethnic society, if you believe in welcoming immigrants, if you believe in peace, and if you believe that we as a people should be able to deliberately improve our economic situation—then you need to get involved in the project of presenting the American people with solutions to the problems that are tearing Americans’ lives to shreds. If you don’t, then the fascists are going to win.

Trump let the genie out of the bottle. For three presidential cycles, Democrats brought in hundreds of millions of small donations while Republicans never figured it out. Trump figured it out—and called his run not a campaign but a movement. As long as Americans’ standards of living and freedoms are in decline, more and more competent fascists are going to come along to hijack our democracy until one finally wins.

We must put a practical and radical path forward that the American people feel welcome to try! If you’re an activist, campaign volunteer, or professional political operative who is in this for the right reasons, then pointing that way forward and making it possible will be the work of the rest of your life.

The way forward isn’t simply a matter of winning elections—though electing revolutionaries to office at all levels of government is some of the necessary work of the revolution. We need deep healing and transformation in every sphere of our society. Passing laws and paying for government programs will not even scratch the surface of what must be done. This will require organic mass movements in neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions. It will require unions and small business associations organizing not simply to demand concessions from big businesses but to actively reshape the economy. It will require students, parents, teachers, administrators, and community members organizing and participating effectively to make our schools places where children get world-class educations. It will require creating revolutionary change through every sphere of our society.

I’ve been dreaming of working with Becky since we met way back in 2000. But the idea of writing a book about organizing with her was something I never could have imagined! The Bernie campaign helped realize some other dreams, too. Having worked on the internet’s cutting edge in other insurgent presidential campaigns, in some big roles and some small roles, I knew that presidential campaigns were laboratories where magic happened and new ways of organizing were invented. Becky and I have both long seen the potential to reignite mass movement organizing, and we have been trying to help do that throughout our careers wherever we were.

When Bernie called for a political revolution, thousands of local volunteer leaders leapt to their feet and started organizing. Because of the beautiful quirks of Bernie’s campaign, Claire Sandberg, Becky, and I were given the green light—or more accurately, a flashing yellow light—to multiply those volunteers and make them effective in the voter contact work that wins primaries and caucuses. We were given this role over states that the campaign for a long time didn’t care about—and that became critical to winning in the later stages of the primary season.

The tools and methods that our distributed organizing team practiced in collaboration with Bernie volunteers across forty-six states are not brilliant new inventions. They are just a part of good old-fashioned mass movement organizing coming back to life—shaped by the communications technologies of the day—in an environment that made it easy for people like us to orchestrate their resurrection.

We believe these tools and methods are applicable to all kinds of organizing at any level.

We tried to keep this book focused on the Bernie campaign and tried to keep it short. But I would have loved to tell some stories about using some of these rules in small union campaigns with low-wage and immigrant workers, in student antiracism organizing, and in antiwar organizing. What a presidential campaign allows is the opportunity to show how this stuff can function at scale. That is thanks to several factors: the number of people involved, the volunteer software developers who come out of the woodwork to build new tools, the availability of straightforward work (voter contact work) that everyone can do, and the uncomplicated and undebatable goal of the campaign to elect a new president.

But now that these tools and methods for bringing mass movement organizing have been demonstrated, opportunities for all organizations and all movements are manifest. Just as earlier presidential campaigns opened up a whole new world for online fundraising, we hope that Bernie’s campaign can do the same for mass movement organizing.

As this book goes to press, we are living in a moment when mass protest is in the news frequently and making a big impact on our politics. The whole world has been having a bit of an epiphany over the past few decades around the topic of mass protest—from the Color Revolutions to the Arab Spring and from the antiglobalization movement to Occupy Wall Street to the movement to defend black lives. We wholeheartedly endorse what’s been developing.

AND we want to see leaders from movements like these actually take power. A protest movement is not successful if it knocks out an establishment only to replace it with a newer, fresher one that holds the same values and agenda as the old one. Some people in the our movements believe strongly that we should not take power—that we should simply build stronger and stronger protest movements that will eventually wipe away the very existence of power. We respect that view but don’t share it. We want to see the people take power. And we